The present invention relates generally to a recording apparatus, a recording method, and a recording medium and, more particularly, to a recording apparatus, a recording method, and a recording medium that are suitable for use in recording compressed and encoded audio data provided by downloading services.
Recently, digital satellite broadcasting such as SKY PerfectTV (a trademark) for example is becoming widespread. Compared with conventional analog broadcasting, digital satellite broadcasting can transmit signals of higher quality and provide multichannel service. The digital satellite service like this provides many channels dedicated to sports, movies, music, news and so on. Among these dedicated channels, the music channel is one of most popular channels.
Viewing (including listening to) such a music channel may make viewers want to buy CDs for example of the music they listened on the channel. It is convenient for viewers if they can download the music while viewing it on the music channel. To realize this, the applicant hereof proposed a system, as Japanese Patent Application No. Hei 10-201731 for example, in which music data encoded by use of ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) are multiplexed on the main broadcast signals (video signal and audio signal) of the music channel for distribution and viewers who bought (or downloaded) the ATRAC data are billed.
It should be noted that ATRAC is a coding scheme for use in recording audio data onto MD (Mini Disc) (trademark) recording media.
Meanwhile, no specific proposal has been made for an MD recording apparatus for constituting the above-mentioned system, namely an apparatus for recording ATRAC-based audio data onto an MD without decoding.